Coming Up For Air
WFLA talk host Bob Lassiter is a man who loves to be loathed
If you had tuned to talk station WFLA-AM Friday, August 2, you might have heard nothing, for ten minutes. It wasn't a mistake, or a power outage.
It was a showdown.
Normally, more than a second or two of dead air would be disaster-- the surest way to lose listeners. But on the Bob Lassiter Show, which is often a little more, or a little less, than a call-in radio show-- the silence was riveting.
Lassiter has built a career on pushing the limits of radio, and his mischief has made him more successful, and more disliked, than most talk show hosts. His nightly call-in show garners a larger audience share than any other on Tampa Bay radio.
And sometimes it ain't pretty.
When he decides to pick a fight with a caller, and he does quite often, he can be vicious, sarcastic, or hang up with great gusto. Yet, if he deems a caller especially annoying or lame, he might just clam up and let the person make a fool of himself, and hang up in surrender.
This time a caller turned the silence into a dare.
"I can outwait you, Bobby."
Lassiter lit a cigarette.
"I've got a 120 minutes on this cell phone."
All listeners could hear was a five thousand watt transmitter broadcasting the ambient rustle and whir of a man driving his car and a talk host lightly tapping his fingers on the console.
"Come on, Bob," the guy pleaded after three desolate minutes.
Four minutes later, Lassiter lit another Winston and exhaled.
The man had been ignored for over eight and a half minutes when he capitulated: "All right Bob, I'm not worthy. I'm pulling into my house."
No reaction.
"I've gotta drop. You win . . . You're the king."
No answer.
Then after remaining mute for 9 minutes and 52 seconds, Lassiter did what he had to do-- he pushed two buttons, one to hang up the phone, and another to start the recorded station ID/news intro. It was 8:00 after all.
On the other side of the headlines, weather, and some commercials, Lassiter explained: "What the hell could I do? He challenged my manhood . . . Don't call up and play games like that with me!"
Five nights a week there is a continuing drama on WFLA, and Bob Lassiter is always the hero.
* * *
At seven o'clock, the man they call the Mad Dog gets behind the mike with a couple of packs of Winston 100's, a brass Zippo lighter and extensive notes, ready to incite and entertain his audience.
Paralleling the rise of shock jocks, personalities like Lassiter have turned conventional notions of talk radio upside-down. What used to be friendly radio voices discussing issues and offering advice has become spectacle-- a format where entertainment is paramount and nothing is sacred.
"I changed talk radio," boasts Lassiter. "Talk radio prior to me had been an old people's format and I made it a young people's format. I made it fun to listen to."
Before the ascendance of mouthy monstrosities like Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, Lassiter was pulling in a huge audience here in the late 80's with his own brand of tirade radio-- attacking listeners and callers more often than issues or politicians.
By the time Lassiter left town for a million-dollar deal at WLS in Chicago in 1989, he was the biggest talk show host in town-- in both popularity and sheer mass, weighing in around 320.
During his six and a half year absence from WFLA, he lost 90 of those pounds and a little momentum in his radio career.
In that time talk radio exploded around the country, much of it driven by right-wing political showmen like Limbaugh, Liddy, and WFLA's Mark Larson.
Lassiter calls the trend "support group radio," and says he hears too much of it on WFLA these days. "The vast majority of their core listenership wants to hear Clinton bashing. There's no debate, no discussion on that radio station."
Which sounds noble, even political, but he doesn't pretend his program is forum for ideas. The debate on Lassiter's show is as likely to be a petty argument as a real discussion. "I'm not a political animal," Lassiter admits. "I'm not trying to make a point. I'm just trying to get provocative calls . . . It makes no difference if I change anyone's mind, or influence anyone to do something. It's not the point of my show."
So what is the point?
Lassiter has said on the air that his only purpose in life is "to deliver a lot of people to listen to the commercials," and more often than not, he does that by irritating the hell out of people.
"The secret to my success is that the people who despise me listen to me," Lassiter says. "Probably no one has more listeners that hate him than I do."
Since returning to WFLA in April, Lassiter's back on the station where he had his greatest success, and one that understands his schtick. His license to browbeat and berate has been fully reinstated-- as long as he keeps thousands of ears around to hear that advertising.
So far it's working out just fine.
"I have no concern about anybody offending anybody," says WFLA Operations Manager Gabe Hobbs. "If I go a day without complaints I start to worry."
* * *
At 50, Bob Lassiter is a radio veteran, for half his life he's made a living as a personality, a voice . . . and what a voice, a magnificent baritone that seduces and taunts with equal authority.
A high school dropout from a Jersey suburb of Philadelphia, Lassiter spent early adulthood wandering the country and working odd jobs. Radio discovered him at a crowded happy hour on the island of St. Thomas in 1970. A salesman from a beautiful music station heard his rich speaking voice, and soon the future Mad Dog of radio was playing sides of Mantovani in the Caribbean.
After years as a music DJ around the eastern U.S., he longed to break into talk. In '84 he got his chance on a low rated Miami talk station, where he caught the ear of talk monster Neil Rogers.
In Miami, Lassiter tutored under the lashing wit and acidic irreverence of Rogers, who at the time was one of the few big city pioneers who were making it big by bending the rules of talk radio-- by being outrageous, vulgar, and often mean.
Lassiter became so adept at it that after a grueling succession of air shifts he hollered at a caller: "You're so full of shit your eyes are brown!" Which cost him his job.
Then at Tampa Bay's first all talk station, the now defunct WPLP, Lassiter perfected his trademark monologue. "It dawned on me that if I talked for an hour, hour and a half, by the time I stopped these people weren't rational. And then I would just rip them to shreds."
The elderly have traditionally been avid talk radio listeners, and WPLP had plenty. Lassiter made fun of them, abused them, and drove them nuts. "That's where 'Mad Dog' came from," Lassiter recalls. After a provocative monologue an elderly woman called in "and all she could do was scream-- 'You're a mad dog! A mad dog!"
"I have no problem unloading on old people," says Lassiter. "I discovered the more you beat up old people the younger your audience becomes. Young people love to hear it."
Which again is fine with WFLA's Hobbs: "We set out to alienate the 65 plus audience."
* * *
As a radio bully, Lassiter's biggest weapons are his mouth and his often misanthropic mind. Most nights he opens his show with a bit of oratory-- a story, a lecture, or maybe a complicated question. Within his words he typically sets a trap with outrageous statements or ideas that dare listeners to pick up the phone and challenge him.
Christians are asked to pray for Satan's redemption. Gun owners are asked to surrender their guns to the police during times of emotional stress. And sometimes just for fun Lassiter will invite irate listeners to call up and insult him.
While he's full of haughty bluster and vulgar as the FCC allows, Lassiter's approach is surprisingly intellectual for talk radio. "I do a 2-tier show," he admits. "I do a show for half the audience that understands what I'm doing, so the half that don't can amuse the other half." It's the callers that don't understand that often makes his show entertaining. "Nobody listens to hear intelligent callers," contends Lassiter.
But plenty listen to hear profound stuff like: "Get off my phone you asshole!"
"I approach my show in pretty much the same way that a lawyer approaches a trial," Lassiter says. And when he's particularly prickly, his show resembles a kangaroo court where Lassiter is prosecutor, judge and jury.
"If the caller is saying things you don't want said, you basically just let him keep on talking . . . " Lassiter explains. "And sooner or later he will say something that is inaccurate and then you destroy him on that one issue which shakes his credibility, and allows you to go away looking like a star."
His adversarial stance often leads him to take the side of societal underdogs-- minorities and the underclass-- but don't call him a liberal. "I have no left-leaning feelings," Lassiter says. "I don't believe government is the answers to our problems."
He says he constantly struggles with defending the unlucky and unwashed: "The little guy really pisses me off because he won't do crap for himself . . . At least three times a day I go through one these-- Fuck you! You're too goddamn stupid to help yourself. Let 'em screw ya! And then immediately followed by-- Ohhh, I can't feel that way."
While he ain't no bleeding heart, he's worlds away from the right-wing yuppie perspective of WFLA's late-morning guy, Mark Larson.
Typically, Larson's callers don't challenge him much. Most agree that adults that earn the minimum wage are losers, folks on welfare are barely human, and that imprisoned criminals deserve outright torture.
When Larson does tussle over the phone, it's not usually with liberals, but with racists, Jew haters, or anti-government wackos. Although he's forced to censure some of the hatred he attracts, there is one minority that is always fair game on his show-- homosexuals, specifically gay men.
Each Wednesday on the show is Hump Day, reserved specifically for gay bashing and chuckle-packed homophobia. Larson and his callers engage in cliché imitations of effeminate men and mean spirited juvenile humor. Larson constantly refers to gay males as "fudgepackers," and suggests that many AIDS victims deserve their fate. During the recent GALA festival, a huge gathering of gay and lesbian entertainers from around the world, the persecution rose to a fevered pitch.
"It is absolutely inexcusable," says Lassiter. On his show he's countered the weekly hatefest by openly wondering why Larson spews abuse on a harmless minority, and says he'll keep it up until he shames him out of it.
WFLA's Gabe Hobbs says Larson's gay bashing is the same as Lassiter's trashing of Bible thumpers and the elderly, and "We don't have any sacred cows." But Assistant Operations Manager Sue Trecasse sees it a little differently:
"Personally, ninety-percent of the time I totally disagree with him, and I find it repugnant. Professionally, I think he's perfectly within his rights to do it." She says the station has conducted a little audience research into Hump Day. "It doesn't seem to bother the people that listen to the radio station. Draw whatever conclusion from that."
"It's not a public service, it's a business," acknowledges Lassiter. "You don't have a right to radio, or to good radio."
What you get is what the majority of listeners like, or condone.
* * *
It's not easy to be a radio talk show host, at least not a good one. It takes a certain amount of ego, verbal acumen and an agile mind. "It has to come naturally," says Gabe Hobbs. "They either have it or they don't."
No doubt Lassiter has it-- But what is it?
While in Miami, Lassiter says he studied all the talk show hosts: "I listened to all nineteen and tried to figure out why three were so much more successful than the other sixteen . . . All three of them came in every day and kept a knife on the console, they picked it up and split their stomachs open and heaved their guts on the console."
One was his mentor, Neil Rogers.
"I earn my living cutting my gut open and exposing myself," says Lassiter. "Most people can't do that. It's why they pay me, and other people like me-- because we can. We have no shame. We have no secrets."
And sometimes they have no mercy.
Radio is a rough business: stations, jobs and formats are change and disappear all the time. It's a competitive field with very little job security. Add the tremendous ego and hostility inherent to talk radio, and the workplace can become a nightmare-- bad dreams Lassiter lived through at WLS and WSUN.
Lassiter calls his time in Chicago "a constant battle-- two and a half years of hell." He was at odds with management from the first day. "They'd scream everyday and I'd scream right back at them."
Even worse, they put the Mad Dog on a short leash, but he kept breaking the chain.
When told to curb his usual vulgarity and verbal abuse, he developed a code of secret insults which sounded like glowing compliments, and made the list available to listeners. When he was forbidden from saying he'd ever lived or worked anywhere other than Chicago, he'd coyly carry on in mock ignorance with the callers that remembered him from Florida.
"Tampa? Can't say as I've ever worked there."
"Oh, Sure you did, remember WFLA?'
"WFLA? I can't say as I've ever worked there."
It confused listeners who knew better, and drove management insane. By late '91 they had enough of his antics and let him go, and for over a year the bully had no pulpit.
Corporate honcho for ABC/Capital Cities (the owners of WLS) Norm Shrutt admits that Lassiter's tenure there did show "moments of greatness," but contends "some acts work in some towns and won't work in others."
Conversely, former boss Tradup says "Chicago wasn't ready for him. He was a little before his time here. Now, people all down the dial are clones of Lassiter . . . people that are in your face."
* * *
When WSUN brought Lassiter back to host Morning drive in '93, he was the only local talent on the station; the rest of the personalities were pumped in from sister station WIOD in Miami, including Lassiter's friend Neil Rogers.
After the WIOD crew broadcast their shows from WSUN for a week while their home studios were being overhauled, the station was never the same.
Lassiter recalls it all started when caustic talk "goddess" Randi Rhodes left the WSUN studio a mess one night. "It was a trick I learned from Neil, I did my whole show basically on what a fucking pig pen the place was." Like Lassiter a few years before, Rhodes was Rogers' newest protege. "So he ripped into me for that . . . it just got worse, and worse, and worse.
Listeners and callers got caught up in the carnage. "We all say it's only radio people-- get a life," says Lassiter. "But when you're out for blood, you know how to do it."
The bitter on-air rants between Lassiter and his old mentor were very real. "He drew blood on me and I drew blood on him," Lassiter recalls. "I doubt I'll ever talk to him again. He still talks about me quite a bit-- in a very derogatory way."
Maybe that's the risk of tossing your guts on the console.
When WFLA lost popular afternoon yuckster Lionel to New York's WABC in '94, they relocated Al Gardner, the host of their breezy morning news show, into the 4 to 7 slot-- up against the Mad Dog. He ended up getting mauled.
"It was a mistake," concedes WFLA's Hobbs. For the first time, Lassiter soundly trounced his old station in the ratings. Gardner represented the old school of talk radio, a newsguy turned talk host chatting about issues. According to Hobbs, Gardner's handicap was that he tried to use his show to "make the world a better place for his children to grow up in."
Perhaps Al Gardner didn't realize talk radio has become the realm of brawlers and performers, not friendly voices out of the newsroom.
Although he wasn't muzzled at WSUN like he was in Chicago, the station itself often put Lassiter at a disadvantage. To compete with an increasingly political WFLA, WSUN billed itself as Entertainment Talk Radio and their format was aggressively non-topic. While not overtly political, Lassiter's monologues were obviously topics, and weren't heard as often.
Gradually, the more urbane WIOD hosts were usurped by a wacky bunch of local programs. In the last year of WSUN he shared airwaves with a couple of shock jocks, a psychic, and a sexual advisor. For a guy who was used to setting the tone of a talk station, at WSUN Lassiter was just another booth at a sideshow.
Then in November of '95 WSUN tossed in the talk towel, and opted for cheaper and easier all-sports format, and Lassiter was back on the street again.
The very day the news came, WFLA started trying to lure him back to their frequency, but just like approaching a real mad dog, the station had to bravely extend their hand and let him sniff at it.
"It was kind of amusing because it was a series of phone calls that started with people who had no authority to hire me whatsoever . . . They didn't know how I would react," says Lassiter. "I wouldn't have called them for love or money."
"Good talent in this format is probably the most difficult talent to find in radio," says Trecasse. "Bob Lassiter is a heavy hitter. That's why we hired him back. It was a wonderful opportunity."
His contract has a meaty base salary, with plenty of gravy available-- each ratings increase adds more money to his pile. "There's no limit on that deal," adds Hobbs. "There's no cap."
"I'll probably make more money here doing nights here than I made in Chicago doing afternoon drive," says Lassiter.
"I'll make a fortune."
* * *
When WFLA announced his return, Operation Manager Hobbs predicted: "People can listen to the old Lassiter again." Which seemed to be confirmed by Lassiter's opening monologue: "I'm going to make your head hurt . . . Sometime in the next day, or three, or year I'll say something to piss you off."
Some listeners cheer or complain that Lassiter isn't as brutal as he was in the 80's. Others who first heard him on WSUN note his show on WFLA isn't as much fun. The truth is, for better or worse, he strives to endure as a new Lassiter. "You have to constantly change, yet without giving the perception of having changed," he admits. "Or you eventually burn out your audience."
He made his mark as a meany, but he can be equally warm and fuzzy when the mood strikes him. "When I find myself two or three days in a row with a dark cloud over my head, then I will deliberately go in and do two or three pointless, light-hearted shows . . . I do a lot of soft, mushy things."
Tom Tradup, his old boss in Chicago says, "People stereotype him as abrasive, but he has a delicious sense of humor." A longtime female fan in Tampa said: "I love him. Even if he has nothing interesting to say I think I'd still be sucked in by his voice . . . it's kind of like Barry White."
Lassiter is a crowd pleaser, and his show can be addictive. He knows how to hook you-- with a provocative monologue, a gut wrenching story from his childhood, or just a lively skirmish with a caller.
He obviously likes being the center of attention, "I'm an only child," Lassiter explains-- but he's also surprisingly shy, and doesn't necessarily want to see the crowds he pleases, or pisses off.
On his show he's said: "I'm a recluse, and rarely leave the house, and a social misfit, and I really don't like to talk to strangers . . . I can only do that in here."
He recently told a caller that he didn't mind meeting fans at promotional events, but added: "You find me in the department store and come up to me-- you're taking your life in your hands!"
Not long ago, Lassiter explained how he learned to be a talk host: "People would come over to my house to be abused like this. That's how I trained for this. Now I don't have anybody to come over to my house anymore."
But even if he doesn't have as many friends nowadays, he's not looking for any over the radio-- "I don't need to be liked. I know who and what I am."
On his show he's said: "I'm not here to be your friend. I don't want you to listen to me because you think I'm your friend.
I just don't want you to turn the damn thing off!"